Comcast BVE / Business Voice Edge settings you should hopefully never need

Useful info for the Comcast Business Voice Edge service:

The portal login is at https://voiceedge.comcast.com/ – at the time of this writing the security certificate is expired (way to go Cumcast)
To log in as admin, you must add TA to the end of your username authorized as administrator. For instance: rmutt1917TA

If your phones lose their settings including the provisioning server they will act really stupid. Press Menu -> Status -> Network to find the phone’s IP address then log into it from a web browser. On Polycom phones the admin password is 456

Go to Settings -> Provisioning Server. The Comcast business voice / Comcast BVE provisioning server address is http://bvedms01.wdv.comcast.net:80/dms/bw/host/wdv-7/dms-psip/
No password.
Server user: PlcmSpIp
Tag SN to UA disabled

If you have other WORKING phones on your network when this happens, please confirm the provisioning address on those first – the fact that it ends in 01 makes me wonder if this may vary regionally. (???)

Note that if the DHCP on your network provides an option 66 response to point phones to a TFTP server, the provisioning WILL fail as the phone is too dumb to proceed to the programmed provisioning server address. Once it gets a tftp address passed to it and this provisioning method fails, it will give up immediately and throw the toys right out of the pram. Wondering if your lan’s dhcp provides response 66? Did you set it to? If not, then it doesn’t. End of story. Honestly, most embedded device/router DHCP daemons don’t even support it.

You can use firmware versions later than what Comcast provides and I’ve had much better results doing so (better audio quality, fixes phone UI hangs/reboots….)
Go to Utilities -> Software Upgrade in the web UI. If you’ve never done this before, go ahead and select Polycom hosted server, click check for updates. The software version selector will populate. Choose the latest version and make it so.

If you HAVE done this before, do not click check for updates. The web UI and then the phone itself will freeze*. Uhhhh, it’s a feature, not a bug?! Click clear upgrade server. The phone will reboot, DOWNGRADE to whatever Comcast provides you, then you’ll be able to do the aforementioned procedure. Hey, we didn’t become Comcast customers because we wanted sane, reasonable, and logical services, did we?

* may be a model dependent thing. The SoundPoint 335 locks up like a dumb brick and eventually reboots itself, but the SoundStation will just do it all right. Who knows. I hate these things, they always make it sound like the person you’re talking to is actually talking waaaay too close to your ear and like you’re half expecting to spit down your ear canal or drool on your shoulder

4 thoughts on “Comcast BVE / Business Voice Edge settings you should hopefully never need”

  1. The PolyCom Admin password for our system is 283 for some reason. Our provisioning server is set to
    Type: HTTP
    Server: bvedms01.wdv.comcast.net:80/dms/bw/host/wdv-10/dms-psip/
    Username: PlcmSpIp
    The password is set to four characters **** no clue what it is though… 🙁
    File Transmit Retries: 3
    Retry Wait: 1
    Tag SN to UA: Disable

    1. My experience was that the password displayed as asterisks but did not actually exist. If you want to find out what it is, though, it’s sent in plaintext and can be easily read off a Wireshark capture.

      SHAAAARK!!!!

      1. We got VoiceEdge services installed about a month ago. I am the Network Admin for my company and the main contact for our Comcast services. As a power user, I am having a few issues.

        The other day, I was trying change somethings specified in the Polycom user guide (which was set to me from my Comcast project manager) and mos things require changing the config file. I was dumb enough to factory reset my phone and as a result, the provisioning server wouldn’t push the config file to my phone anymore. However, in the web configuration utility, I was able to sign in with default passwords (admin password: 456) and I made a few changes to my factory defaulted phone. Well, I couldn’t get calls without their provisions so I called in. Comcast ended up sending me a replacement phone and shockingly enough, the changes I made after I defaulted my phone were applied to the new phone when the Comcast rep. pushed the config file to the new one.

        However, the admin password was changed back to whatever Comcast has it as and I can’t change the things I could with the factory defaulted phone. Id prefer not to RMA a phone every time I want to change an admin setting. Our issue is that in order to enable WireShark capture on the phone, we would have to change the config file to enable it according to polycom. That we can not do without logging in to the Comcast provisioning server. Any ideas? Thank you.

        1. Get sneakier.

          Are your phones on a separate network or mixed with your other devices?

          You just need to use the proper ARP tricks to let you snarf the traffic through another switch port, or plug it into a hub along with your computer. Hub, I tell you!

          Or set up a Linux box with two interfaces bridged and sniff off br0.

          You have ways of making it talk.

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